Asaf Levy

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice"

The wonderful beginning of 100 years of solitude

Stubai slowly vanishing glacier

Ubercool

Stubai High Trail, Austria

No Tsunami warning in North Dakota
🤯

I was promoter.... :)

I was promoter to an Associate Prof. with tenure today.
I am grateful to my beloved family, past and present students I was lucky to work with, great colleagues and collaborators.

I wish my father Amos was still alive to share with me this joyful moment. It would have made him proud.

I don't remember observing so many professors per square meter outside a conference, as in tonight's demonstration against the war and our government. For one of them, who is an editor and a permanent drummer in the demonstrations, I still owe sending a peer review report...

Expression level of anti-phage defence systems controls a trade-off between protection range and autoimmunity - Nature Microbiology The authors examine several defense systems and find that increased expression enhances their protection range, albeit at a cost of autoimmunity.

Expression level of anti-phage defence systems controls a trade-off between protection range and autoimmunity
By Nitzan Aframian and Avigdor Eldar.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

-1: a genome that we manually classified as ambigious. We can't classify if it is host-associated or not. E.g. a microbe from a sandwich...
0: the model could not classify as h or n.

I thought her last name meant 'free' in Arabic but now I read in wiki about this nice 'mutation': Khoury means "priest" in Levantine Arabic. It derives from the Latin word curia, or may come from the French curé meaning parish Priest, from Latin curatus "one responsible for the care (of souls),"

Nice. Was she a Maronite Lebanese?

A recent paper reveals that while LPS deficiency shields bacteria from phage infection (they lack receptor), it heightens vulnerability to T6SS contact-dependent antagonism, highlighting a critical evolutionary constraint.

by @seeyeunting.bsky.social
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Scientists and engineers could:

Sequence the human genome
Put a man on the moon
Invent the internet
Solve protein folding problem
Decipher the complex immune system.

But fail to design a poster session in which you can actually hear the presenter.
In nearly every meeting out there.

Hanna was a pioneeer of Israeli Microbiology, educated several PIs, she was awarded the EMET prize and is by the way also Elio Schaechter's cousin.
@stcmicrobeblog.bsky.social

Ilana Kolodkin-Gal talks about her late mentor Prof. Hanna Engelberg-Kulka who discovered the first TA system carried on bacterial chromosomes (MazEF) in 1996 at #ISM2025.

MazE = "what is it?"... in Hebrew
As they didn't know their gene function in the beginning.

Can you pease elaborate?

Lab's first PhD graduate, the amazing Alex Geller!
Now he's doing exciting comp. bio. reseaech in the industry.
#ProudPI

Microbial drivers of root plasticity Soils are highly heterogeneous and dynamic systems, experiencing a constant flow of plant root exudates and moisture fluctuations that affect nutrient distribution, soil physicochemical properties, a...

New Tansley review out in @newphyt.bsky.social with @fdiniandreote.bsky.social and Gabriel Castrillo! We explore how the root is shaped by dialogue with soil microbes—highlighting emerging mechanisms and future research directions in root plasticity and microbiome interactions.
tinyurl.com/38mkyx5t

Thanks for sharing, Emmanuele.

Great collaborative effort by:

Ofir Segev, Alexander Martin Geller (who receives his PhD today!), Cristina Bez, Peihan Wang, Avital Akerman-Arad, Lusine Nazaretyan, Prof. Fei Chen (Beijing Institute of Genomics), and Prof. Vittorio Venturi (ICGEB).

The Genetic Basis of Bacterial Adaptation to Hosts Microbes colonize and interact with diverse multicellular hosts using specialized genes, many of which remain unidentified. Better understanding of host-associated gene functions is a key aspect of mi...

This work opens the door to:

1. Better microbial ecology models
2. Engineering beneficial microbes
3. Identifying new virulence or symbiosis factors
Read the preprint & share your thoughts!
#Microbiome #ComparativeGenomics #HostMicrob #PlantMicrobiome #Bioinformatics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

To support the community, we built:
🔍 GOTHAM DB
Genes Of Traits of Host-Associated Microbes = GOTHAM...
A free, browsable database of host-adaptive genes
📊 Explore 70k+ genomes by domain, protein, operon, or host type
👉 ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/GeneAdaption...

We also compared microbial adaptation to animals vs. plants. The clearest signals were carbohydrate catabolism (this is how it is when you live next to a "sugar factory" due to photosynthesis) for plant association and surprising mercury detoxification for animal association.

We didn’t stop at computation.
We knocked out 7 novel genes in diverse plant-associated bacteria and tested rice root colonization.
Result?
👉 5 of 7 mutants were significantly impaired
🌱 Root colonization ↓
🦠 Motility & ROS resistance ↓

💡Some insights for host-association: biological nitrogen fixation, certain transposons, trehalose, folate, and sideorophore biosynthesis, mercury detoxifacation, cell adhesion, T3SS, are clearly enriched.

We identified:

3,000+ enriched Pfam domains

16,000+ enriched AlphaFold clusters

1,500+ operons enriched in host-associated bacteria
🧬 Many with no known function—yet strongly conserved across taxa

Host-associated bacteria carry specialized genes—but most remain uncharacterized.
We performed enrichment analyses using both Pfam domains and AlphaFold structural clusters (AFCs), across >100 bacterial genera and families.
We used 5 statistical tests to detect enrichments.

The Genetic Basis of Bacterial Adaptation to Hosts Microbes colonize and interact with diverse multicellular hosts using specialized genes, many of which remain unidentified. Better understanding of host-associated gene functions is a key aspect of mi...

📢 New preprint alert!
We used comparative genomics on 72,000+ bacterial genomes to uncover the genetic basis of microbial adaptation to multicellular hosts—plants and animals alike.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

You're quick Akos! I planned to write a thread about it

!!!